


Half A Person

by Le_Chien_Bleu



Category: The Libertines
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Angst, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Dubious Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Public Humiliation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-08-07 06:07:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7703467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Le_Chien_Bleu/pseuds/Le_Chien_Bleu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU fic, set in BDSM-Universe (a land where domination/submission is the default expression of sexuality, and everyone has an innate preference).  Peter Doherty is a switch, because anything else would be too simple.  Carl Barat is a sub and he's not happy about it.  The boys are Secret Service Agents for the British Government.  </p><p>100% fiction.  Based very lightly on RL counterparts; I have appropriated some RL situations, places, people etc.  They continue to belong to their original owners and I promise to put everything back where I found it.  I mean no harm.  I come in slashy peace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half A Person

**INTRODUCTION**

**THAT’S THE STORY OF MY LIFE…**

 

Carl Barat is a sub.  He knows this from the first time he falls in love, with the brightest boy in the class, who peers down his perfectly straight nose at Carl and sniffs that he doesn’t play with inferiors. 

Knowing something is not the same as liking it.

You can be whatever you choose, his mother told him, when he came home crying.  But his mother is a hopeless hippy, and she chooses to live on a commune where doms and subs muddle together in one confused tangle, everyone pretending not to be what they are.

Carl is unimpressed by school holidays in their utopia without boundaries: tops trying not to grit their teeth when they give each other orders; subs confused and fractious as they toss around commands like grenades.  Nobody wears anybody’s collar, and no one belongs to anyone else.  And everybody pretends not to mind.

But Carl watches and listens and learns.  By the time he is a teenager, he is adept at shrugging power and submission on and off, like hats. 

Most of the time, Carl chooses to be a top.  Why, after all, would you choose to be something that half of society secretly despises?  The official word is that everything’s equal now.  But people don’t change quickly. 

Carl has ambition; he is bright enough to understand that what people say and what they mean are very different.  You have only to be in the company of tops for half an hour to hear all the secret, dirty things they still think when nobody is listening.  Weak, stupid, needy, you have to hurt them for their own good.

He slides into a government job by sleight of hand, and is never quite sure how he pulled it off.  He fills out the paperwork faster than the ink can dry.  It doesn’t take a second thought to write DOM in the blank box.  Later, personality testing teases out the truth; his mentor is a progressive man, but Her Majesty’s Secret Service is not.  All nonsense, says his mentor, but probably best to play along.  His personal file is corrected, but Carl’s official ID keeps its solid, dark D.

Carl understands the language of domination intimately.  When you crave something deep in your soul, you know its every breath and line.  He knows how to square his jaw and issue a command, how to push enough control into his voice to bend someone to his will.  (He knows the way it feels, curling like fingers around the base of your spine, bowing you gratefully into the ground).

He chooses.  He chooses soft, pliant subs.  Pretty candy floss girls who are just pleading for a big, bad dom to come and teach them a lesson.  They don’t look too closely with their eyes fixed on the floor.  And he likes the feeling of giving them what they need.  It is something close to satisfaction, it almost scratches at the deep, twisting need that he buries deep.

Choice is an illusion, chant the Sub Pride marchers, waving placards and baring their collared necks.  But Carl knows differently.   He chooses to be free.  Not to be pinned down and owned, collared by someone who wants a shiny toy to show off.  He chooses not to be caged and to believe it is freedom.

But he needs.  He needs the comfort of cold metal around his wrists.  Alone, at night, he closes his own fingers hard around his wrist, or twists them tight in his hair.  He moves hotly, desperately, into his own fist and tries to pretend that his hands belong to someone else.

 

*

 

Peter Doherty is not a sub.  He flits in and out of it, butterfly fast, as he does everything.  Sometimes it is just easier to widen chocolate button eyes, to tilt his head down and blink through dark lashes.  He doesn’t mind how he gets people to do what he wants. 

He doesn’t really mean it when he is down on his knees.  He looks up with a smile dancing over his lips, and there is no surrender when he takes someone in his clever mouth and undoes them.  (But plenty of tops do it.  They just don’t talk about it in public.)

There are days when he armours himself in the hard, tailored lines of an expensive suit.  It is a language that other men understand – the kind of men who need to see their own masculine certainty mirrored back at them. 

Other times, he smudges and softens.  He is boyish and young, stretching his pale, swan neck to be collared.  Or playful, flirting haphazardly with anyone who stumbles his way.  He bites his wide, pink lips and frets the hem of his shirt with long, dirty fingers.  Then, nice ladies want to take care of him, and not so nice men want to take care of him.

Now and again, he might wriggle into fishnet and leather, flashing his inked limbs and pouting red, painted lips; he reflects the night in his dark eyes, and makes everyone around him see stars.  He wipes it away as easily as the oily smear of lipstick, like a forgotten kiss.

None of it is acting, not consciously.  He just can’t help seeing what people want, and he gives it to them.

He sees the desperate fear in the eyes of tops who are too rough, who push too hard and don’t hear no.  He can read the sickened flinch of subs who hate their own bmission, who swallow all the stupid, poisonous things that people say, and choke on their imagined weakness.

Peter understands that there is as much power in surrender, as in possession, if you do it right. 

When he chooses, the tottering height that should be imposing makes him awkward, a shambling giraffe of a boy.  But then he straightens himself out again and the whole world curls up at his feet.

 

*

 

The first time that they work together, Peter is wearing his sub hat.  (Quite literally, a trilby bound in shiny ribbon, with a tipped up brim that makes his eyes look huge).  He receives Carl’s command voice with a single raised eyebrow.  He does as he’s told anyway, but the insouciant slide to his knees makes it clear that nobody is fooled.

It is the first time that Carl feels himself truly falter.  He looks down at the man kneeling by his feet and feels a pull so strong that he fears he’s going to join him.

When he sees Peter topping someone, it is a kaleidoscope image shaken into place.  They are on another case, not working together this time, but Carl is painfully aware of Peter’s long shadow skimming around him.

Peter on top is a work of art.  And Carl understands now: why people talk about Peter Doherty in hushed voices, why he had heard a dozen ludicrous stories before he ever met the man.  He is starting to believe they might all be true.

He watches their target (a hardened smuggler, who has resisted torture and escaped arrest in three different countries) dissemble under gentle pressure.  Watches Peter tease and pull him apart like warm dough, until he is soft and pliant under his hands.  Watches him pluck the man’s secrets straight from his treacherous mouth. 

Peter towers over the broken boy; there is nothing gangly or uncertain in the confident stretch of his body.  Nothing delicate about the hand that closes steel-hard on the back of the boy’s bowed neck.

‘Kneel,’ he says, as easy as breathing.  The boy obeys, collapsing and clinging to his legs.

The word clamps like a fist around Carl’s spine and buckles his knees.  He finds himself kneeling on the ground – breathless – when Peter turns back to look at him.  His face burns with exposure.

‘Sorry ‘bout that,’ Peter says, lightly.  He shrugs it off and extends a hand to help Carl back to his feet.  ‘Happens a lot, occupational hazard.’

No more is said.  They fill out paperwork, they sit through an endless debriefing.  But the knowledge burns in Carl’s body and he can’t look directly at Peter again. 

 

*

 

Carl is not what he seems.

His hair is too long for a dom, just begging for fingers to snag in its silky strands.  He cuts it sometimes, for a case, or when too many tops start propositioning him, but it makes him feel strange.  Running fingertips over the blunt, chopped ends leaves him shivery and sensitive.

He walks like a tiger, hips swaying to a sleepy beat.  The taut curves of his body hint at coiled energy and power, barely contained under golden skin, ready to spring.

Tops always look at his arse first, face second.  It’s a problem.  He has lost count of the number of times that he’s smacked away an uninvited hand from his behind – spinning around in fury – only to be greeted by a mortified dom, looking thoroughly confused.

When Peter looks at him, it is nothing like the leering appraisals of roving doms, or the flutter-lashed adoration of the subs who fall for his cheap tricks.  Peter really sees him.  He dismantles him in one sweeping glance.

Caught in the dark beam of Peter’s attention, he feels flayed to the bone, so that everyone can see all the terrible things he has ever wanted.  He wants to get on his knees for him, he wants to feel the grip of those long fingers in his hair. 

But Carl knows by now that I want, never gets.

He sets his shoulders beneath the reassuring bulk of his leather jacket, wrapping around him like a shield.  He reaches up – arching his neck to compensate for Peter’s ridiculous height – to look him in the eye and doesn’t blink.

 

*

 

Peter is everything that he has been looking for.  The realisation grabs him, wrapping its cord tight around his neck, and he can’t breathe or swallow. 

He is extraordinary, like nothing that Carl has ever seen before.  All that soft, long lashed beauty, belying a steely core.  Yet he seems fascinated by Carl.  He listens to him speak as if he is memorising every word.  He watches him avidly, whether he is detonating an explosive with unshaking fingers, or eating an apple.

He seems to understand what Carl is, to feel the twist and pull of resistance and need in him.  Without being told.  And, thank god, without feeling the need to ask or talk about it. 

When he leans into him – mid sentence, head bowing to reach his lips – Carl wants to surrender. 

Peter switches, easily and in the fluttering of an eye.  He can fall to his knees without any of the angry aggression that usually comes with tops, when they try to make themselves submit. 

He doesn’t say any of the terrible things that tops say, when they think they are amongst friends.  There is none of the contempt that bleeds through the power, that says in the cruel twist of a hand that Carl is weak and easy for letting himself be dominated.  It’s a gift, says Peter – after he has taken down their suspect, and delivered the boy with gentle hands and promises for his safety – when someone chooses to submit to you.

And Carl dares to think that maybe this could work.  He wants to give himself up to Peter and he thinks that, just maybe, he could still look him in the eye the next day.  The dark, gnawing need in him feels like desire, and not like a shameful secret that he has to thrust away.

But then he disappears in the middle of the case. 

Carl waits for hours in the rain.  He watches the stone monument soak a darker shade of grey, and feels the water weighing him down.  He scours the grimy city streets, imagining terrible things. 

He finds him on a dirty mattress, out of his mind, in a squat where the walls are soaked with damp and despair.  Peter is wrapped around a creature who looks more dog than man, mangy hair and flesh stripped to bare muscle.

Research, Peter says, following a lead.  And all the other things that people like him say when they are caught red handed.

Carl has seen this before: addiction is common in tops who can’t get used to the power they wield, the craving to bend and break.  When they cannot sate it with willing subs, or unwilling subs, they turn on themselves instead.  It is disappointingly textbook from a man who had let him expect so much more.

It makes them dangerous, shaky, vicious when they are challenged.  You cannot trust a dom who doesn’t trust himself.

Carl doesn’t allow himself to regret it.  Any of it.  Not having to hand over the case, when they were so close.  Not the night time thoughts of long, possessive hands on his skin, covering and owning him.  The memory of Peter’s mouth over his own, soft heat wrapping him up. 

Especially not the look on Peter’s face when he realises who has reported him to head office; for a moment the façade is ruptured, clever mouth struck dumb, eyes flaring wide and dark like a trapped animal.

 

*


End file.
